Via Latin American Herald Tribune:

Widow Slams Official Version of Cuban Prisoner’s Death

HAVANA – The widow of Cuban prisoner Wilman Villar, who dissidents say was a government opponent who died after a lengthy hunger strike to protest his sentence, slammed an official statement denying that her husband had been fasting and calling him an ordinary inmate.

Maritza Pelegrino, Villar’s widow and the mother of their two daughters, said on Saturday that the official version provided by President Raul Castro’s government is “the political police’s story” aimed at “staining (her husband’s) image after his death.”

Cuba’s Communist government on Friday released a statement on the official Web site Cubadebate that described Villar as a “common inmate” and said there was “abundant proof and testimony that show that he was not a ‘dissident’ nor was he on hunger strike.”

Cuban authorities said Villar, who died Thursday at a hospital in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba, was jailed on Nov. 25 after a domestic violence incident in which he was accused of injuring his wife in the face.

Villar’s mother-in-law called the authorities and when police arrived at the scene he violently resisted their attempts to arrest him, the statement said.

After Villar was booked and released, he “began aligning himself with counter-revolutionary elements in Santiago de Cuba who convinced him his apparent membership in mercenary groups would allow him to avoid justice,” Cubadebate said.

“I deny all of that ... it’s false,” Pelegrino said from Contramaestre, the town in the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba where Villar was buried Friday.

When the government says he was booked and released, they are referring to an incident in which police arrested and beat Villar while he was in an inebriated state and released him on bail a few days later, she said.

“At no time did he hit me,” Pelegrino said. She accused the government of not treating her husband in time and said she believes they “let him die.”

Pelegrino said her last visit to her husband in prison was Dec. 29, when he looked dehydrated and “very skinny,” adding that she is the best proof that he was in fact on a hunger strike because she followed the whole process.